I'm a native English speaker going on twenty years of acquired Russian, since college. "Russkie" in English doesn't correspond to the plural form in Russian to

I'm a native English speaker going on twenty years of acquired Russian, since college. "Russkie" in English doesn't correspond to the plural form in Russian to my intuition. It's the singular, then pluralized in the usual English way. Transliterations make it easy to confuse the difference between the grammatical endings of русский (singular, masculine adjective used as singular noun) and русские (plural adjective used as plural noun). The end of English "Russkie" is pronounced more like the end of "русский", while the plural "русские" would be something like RUSS-key-yay in English, ROOS-key-yay in Russian. The general rule for making singulars plural in English is adding -s. The general rule for Russian nominative-case adjectives is adding -ые or -ие. Granted, native Russian speakers often speed through and slur unstressed grammatical endings, so the difference isn't always discernible in speech.